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WWII book was author’s coping strategy during cancer treatment

In The Necessary War, Tim Cook seeks to go beyond mythmaking and chronicle the grit, the doubt and the occasional failed nerve of mortal men.

Author and historian Tim Cooke with his latest book The Necessary War, in which he writes an intimate history of ordinary Canadians, detailing what their wartime experience actually looked, felt, tasted and smelled like.
(Chris So / Toronto Star)

The unlikeliest of war prime ministers was unenthusiastic and Canada’s military woefully unprepared when, 75 years ago this month, the decision that could not be evaded arrived in their time and place.

On the early morning of Sept. 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler’s forces had poured across the Polish frontier. Britain and France declared reluctant war on Germany. And on Sept. 10, Canada’s Parliament and William Lyon Mackenzie King voted, as they knew they must, to send the young country to war once more.

Not this time the naivete of 1914, the jaunty marching off in full confidence of saving the world and being home by Christmas. No one knew the future. But few expected the Second World War to be anything but horrific.

Even so, as military historian Tim Cook tells it in his new book The Necessary War, most of those Canadians who answered the call to take on the Nazi war machine “were not professional soldiers but civilians who put down their ploughs and pens, leaving behind their factories and schools to serve their King and country.”

And that’s the part of the story Cook is most seized by. “What could possibly drag three million Canadians today into uniform?” How did they do it? And how did they live?

He set out to write an intimate history of ordinary Canadians, detailing what their experience actually looked, felt, tasted and smelled like.

He sought to get beyond mythmaking and chronicle, along with the grit and astonishing heroics, the paralyzing terror, the doubt, the occasional failed nerve of mortal men.

“I didn’t set out to write a heroic history,” he said. “In time of war, men do things that are slightly unbelievable. But at the same time not everyone’s a hero.”

Cook said veterans have told him they wanted their story told from the ordinary serviceman’s point of view.

“A number of them have felt that historians have been at too high a level, focusing on the generals, talking about a Corvette (a small naval vessel) but never actually talking about what it’s like to be in a Corvette — the body odour and guys throwing up all over the place.”

So Cook writes about those things, along with the morale-boosting attributes of song, the solace of alcohol, the informal learning in mess halls, the small pleasures of a cup of tea and cigarette to a sailor coming off watch.

“If you’re not writing about that then you’re missing a good part of the World War II experience.”

By both circumstance and sensibility, Tim Cook brought a singular outlook to this first book in a two-volume account (the second is written and to be published next year).

He was diagnosed with cancer while working on it and, even as he spoke this week with the Star, faces further radiation treatment and chemotherapy.

In a way, he said, the book became his anchor and coping strategy. “You write a book like this, you put the time in, you want to be around on the other side to see it. . .” Three other reasons, of course, are his young daughters Chloe, Emma and Paige.

They provided relief from the testosterone-driven times in which their father was immersed. He would read them bedtime stories about princesses or “learn how to braid hair, which I’ve become quite good at.”

Cook is just 42, remarkably young for a man already so prolific. “A lot of people expect a grey beard.” The fact he’s the son of two PhDs in Canadian history actually had him, in the normal ways of filial rebellion, looking elsewhere for a career. For a time, “I tried to do anything else but history.”

But at Trent University, he met a professor, Stuart Robson, who “turned me on to military history.” He became interested in the soldier poets — Siegfried Sasson, Wilfred Owen — and the “personal and powerful eyewitness accounts.”

After graduating from Trent, he attended a master of war studies program at Royal Military College on a civilian scholarship.

“That’s where I was really exposed to the Canadian forces,” he said. “I had never known anyone in the Canadian forces before that.

“I was in the program with serving officers. They had lived through the Cold War. They had been in NATO. These were guys who had led soldiers preparing to fight the Red Army in World War III. And I was a 23-year-old kid who’d read a lot of poetry. So I learned an awful lot.”

Cook’s master’s thesis on gas warfare became his first book, No Place to Run. He got a job at the national archives. In 2002, he moved to the National War Museum to help set up the new facility. During that time, he completed a PhD. His doctoral thesis became his second book, Clio’s Warriors, an account of the writing of war history.

About a half million people came through the war museum during its first year and that, Cook said, “exposed me to doing history for a wider audience. . . history for hundreds of thousands of people and not just academics in your field that you’re trying to impress.”

He wrote an award-winning two-volume history of the First World War. It was an account that includes descriptions, along with sketches, of latrines and the particular problems of nature’s recurring call in trenches. It included detailed reporting, along with photos, of the miseries of trench foot.

“That put me on a new trajectory. There was a definite transition there from being an academic historian to being a public historian to being whatever I am today.

“Some people have called me a popular historian, which is not a term I love. Although my wife says it’s better to be a popular historian than an unpopular historian.”

What Cook said he hears most frequently in his travels across Canada is that old soldiers, the fathers and uncles and grandfathers, “never talked about it.”

“All of these young guys had grown up in the Depression. All they had known, for the most part, was poverty and belt-tightening. This was a tough generation.” They came back from war in their 20s eager to get on with things. They worked through decades of prosperity. They raised families and, for the most part, had rich working lives.

When they began to retire, “that’s when we started seeing a lot of memoirs coming out,” Cook says. Veterans began to reflect back on their lives. And more relaxed views of masculinity allowed the telling.

For Cook, those reflections were both the stuff of his work and a beacon in the fight of his life.

“I never sat there thinking, ‘Oh, I’m just like a soldier at Dieppe.’ But I would read an account of a guy at Dieppe, or Sicily, or the North Atlantic, and it provided some insight for me.

“These were young men facing death day-in, day-out . . . and there I was going through my own particular form of hell. I drew some strength from that, of reading those accounts. And I drew some strength from writing this book.”

Perhaps as a nod to those old denizens of Corvettes, or for a dose of damn-the-torpedoes spirit his current fight demands, Tim Cook includes in his latest book the lyrics to the “North Atlantic Squadron.” Uncut.

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